Situation

The only two-time winner of the prestigious International Association of Congress Centres (AIPC) award for World's Best Conference Centre - APEX Award, The Vancouver Convention Centre is a green-designed, state-of-the-art facility on the waterfront in downtown Vancouver.

AVW-TELAV has had the privilege of providing the Vancouver Convention Centre with its audio visual rental and installation needs since the original building's doors were opened 22 years ago. When the facility decided to expand, with the addition of a new West building, it wanted to be one of the world's "greenest" convention centres and the largest waterfront convention centre in Canada, AVW-TELAV's involvement in installing the AV infrastructure for the new building was a natural choice.

Solution

The following are some key statistics about the project:

• AV installation of upwards of 75 meeting rooms.
• Installation of more than 600 PA speakers throughout the facility.
• A Crestron control system incorporating in excess of 60 touch panels allowing for the control of Audio, Lighting, HVAC, etc., in each room, all from a single user interface.
• All audio was run either analog or via Ethernet over a Category 6 Bell Data network, instead of being run over a more traditional dedicated audio cabling infrastructure, allowing any signal to be sent anywhere in the building.
• Vancouver Convention Centre's expansion required the audio processing manufacturer Biamp to configure the largest single-system Biamp Audio DSP installation in Canada.

A true team effort to complete, we pre-wired and pre-built all of our equipment racks in Montreal, and then had them shipped to Vancouver. Once the equipment was onsite, AVW-TELAV wrapped everything in shrink wrap so dust from the construction wouldn't cause contamination.

Results

With its expansion complete, the centre has tripled its size to cover 1.1 million square feet (or four city blocks) for a combined total of 473,523 square feet of pre-function, meeting, exhibition, and ballroom space. In the competitive process of selecting a preferred supplier for a massive project such as this, our longstanding, partnership with the Vancouver Convention Centre again demonstrates that AVW-TELAV is recognized for both its rental and its permanent installation expertise. Our contract with the facility now extends another 12 years, until 2020, for its AV customers' rental needs and technological support requirements.

Currently, The Set Shop, an AVW-TELAV division in Toronto that designs and constructs custom-built sets and stages to meet brand, theme and event objectives, is building 50 custom podiums to meet the centre's design requirements.

"For more than 20 years, AVW-TELAV has provided the Vancouver Conference Centre with technologically-advanced upgrades, the technical expertise to maintain these systems, and excellent service to keep our customers happy, which is immensely important to us at the convention centre," commented Catherine Wong, Vice President of Operations, Vancouver Conference Centre.

Back